A traditional and widely held view is that a sustainable approach to destination planning and management ideally requires that marketing and product development are undertaken in an integrated manner. However, if we take just two activities to demonstrate our point, “destination marketing” and “product development” are often conducted by very different organizations located within and outside the tourism destination, at different times, and by different stakeholders with different agendas, values and ideas. This co-ordination problem has been recognized by several authors, referring specifically to the gap between destination marketing activities and tourism planning (i.e. the “marketing-planning gap”). Jamal and Jamrozy (2006), among others, have argued that this gap would need to be bridged in any effort to achieve an integrated and sustainable tourism destination. The messy world of policy, driven largely by critical and social constructionist analyses of policy-making (Provan & Kenis, 2008) and the realization that politics cannot be separated from policy (Bell, 2004), have inspired research that has sought more nuanced understandings of the relational characteristics of stakeholders (Healey, 2006) and governance structures and capacities (de Leon & Varda, 2009). The emergence of network analysis in addition to stakeholder collaboration research offer new avenues for examining this “gap”. Undertaking this challenge in our paper also enables us to explore the under-studied relationship between networks and collaborations in sustainable destination management.